


Neal and Prey

by executrix



Category: Firefly, White Collar
Genre: AU, Episode Tag Our Mrs. Reynolds, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-26
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-17 01:36:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/546194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/executrix/pseuds/executrix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU: Mal wakes up married to a grifter with a bunch of different names, although this one has black hair and blue eyes. Stuff gets stolen, sometimes repeatedly. The Coalition of the Excessively Willing stages a daring rescue. Book has the last laugh.<br/>(Flashbacks in italics.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Neal and Prey

1\.   
The job wasn’t in their wheelhouse, but Serenity’s crew had been through a bad patch lately and had to take whatever work was available. Things went pretty well. The bandits fell for the gag. Zoe started blasting away with the mare’s leg as Mal and Jayne dived off the covered wagon. 

Night fell. Abbot Gommen failed to make an appearance to turn over the other half of their payday. However, the villagers who lived at the foot of the mountain threw a festival to thank Serenity’s crew for saving them. It really was a pretty good party, with a pit full of barbecued lambs and geese and goats and platters of rice studded with dates and raisins. Fiddlers and pipers and drummers played lively dance tunes. River taught the steps to Serenity’s crew, and added a few to the town’s choreographic repertoire. 

Serenity had landed on Athenasios low on supplies and critically low on fuel, so a long night of congratulations linked to an unlimited supply of fresh meat was more than welcome. There was just enough fuel to get to the discount fueling station at New Melbourne, where some opportunities in vintage-canned-sardine smuggling were perhaps to be had. The payment from Athenasios would settle their tab at the fueling station, fill them up for a couple of months, and re-stock the pantry. Mal felt cautiously optimistic about getting a bonus for results. 

If you drank a lot of the Very Fresh local wine really fast you hardly noticed the taste.

2\.   
The next morning, Mal’s headache was so thunderous that it took him a minute to notice how warm the bed was. He put a hand to his forehead to see if he had a fever, and winced at the result. He opened his eyes, turned on the table lamp, and uttered a macaw-like shriek.

He hauled himself up the ladder. In the corridor, he almost ran right-slap into Jayne. “How drunk was I last night?” Mal asked.  
Jayne shrugged. “I passed out.” 

They were not alone in the corridor. “Who the _guai_ is that?” Jayne asked.

The young man, who wasn’t awfully tall but, as even Jayne noticed, was extremely good-looking, reached up and put his arm around Mal’s waist. “I’m his husband,” he said. 

“Hey, Mal, didn’t know you was sly,” Jayne said. Maybe that was why the captain was so partial to kitting himself out in gingham. Jayne wondered who else knew—Zoe, for sure. He was looking forward to telling everybody, but he’d just look dumb if he was spreading old news. 

“I ain’t,” Mal said, tersely working himself out of the embrace. 

“Then what’d you go and get hitched to a boy for, then? Even if it’s a cute one.” 

Mal turned to the newcomer who, like himself, was wearing nothing but undershorts and beginning to notice that the floor underfoot was cold. “Go put some pants on,” he said, then turned back to Jayne. “I didn’t.”  
The young man’s face fell, and tears glittered in his dreamy blue eyes. “I’m sorry I do not please you,” he said.

“Don’t like surprises in general,” Mal said. 

3\. (Three days earlier)  
 _One of the reasons for the Reformation all the way back on Earth-that-Was, was that some monasteries were pretty jolly places. Even if they didn’t have hidden passages to sneak into neighboring nunneries, they had plenty of feast days with roast goose on the menu. Their collections of illuminated manuscripts were the cutting edge in multi-media infotainment._

_The Monastery of the Pantocrator was nothing of the sort. There was wine—heavily resinated to make it keep longer. There was song—hours a day of standing on cold stone floors chanting services in a head-hurting mixture of Russian, Greek, and Old Church Slavonic. There were no women. In fact, no woman was ever allowed on monastery grounds. A short way down (via rocky trails) from the mountainous monastery, there was a peasant village, where a few hundred people hard-scrabbled a living from the thin soil. Only the youths and men were allowed up the paths to work on the monastery grounds and sell the monks a few humble food items they did not produce in-house._

_Abbot Gommen was a tight man with a drachma, and the unceasing asceticism of the monks’ lifestyle made recruitment near-impossible. So, when a novice turned up, his earnest desire to profess this steep and thorny path—and his ability to undertake, without pay, heavy labor that was beyond the ability of mostly-elderly monks—ensured his rapid enrollment into the community. Items such as “growing a beard” and “chanting in Old Church Slavonic” were placed in the Pending basket._

_After three weeks, Brother Benjamin Cooper was ready to split the popsicle stand. That was long enough for him to know the monastery’s routines and rituals, and to be well-enough accepted to be, effectively, invisible. The regime of devotion, hard work, coarse bread and bitter greens was not to his liking. He much preferred hand-sewn calfskin shoes to rope-soled sandals, beautifully tailored suits to thick, scratchy goat-hair robes. The robe’s hood would keep the sun off your face, but with far less style than a rakishly tilted fedora._

_Abbot Gommen was nearsighted, hard of hearing (especially around creditors) and irascible. Brother Benjamin made sure to keep the floor near the abbot’s office particularly well-scrubbed. Most of the time, as he knelt with his scrub brush and bucket, there was nothing to be heard on the other side of the heavy wood door except snoring. Eventually, though, he heard the abbey’s half of a wave. He surmised that a ship would soon be landing. The abbot had hired some kind of private detective to chase after the local bandits--a military veteran, like so many PIs. And the guy was such a straight shooter that he traveled with his own Shepherd. Benjamin shook his head. The mark probably didn’t even know about all those tidy hiding places that made Fireflies so attractive to persons of somewhat lesser moral rectitude._

_When Benjamin arrived at the monastery, he had only a few possessions, wrapped in a humble burlap sack. There was a key to a rented locker sewn into one seam of the sack, where he kept his regular clothes and a few of his passports and the rest of his (very limited; the exchequer desperately needed replenishment) cash._

_There wasn’t much to buy in the village: a pair of clogs, drawstring trousers made of homespun, a coarse linen shirt. The general store did have a rack of postcards. They had faded in the sun, and were so old that the captures had frozen, but that only made them more useful. Benjamin bought a dozen of them, and a bottle of glue and a pair of scissors. After that, he would have had to take a vow of poverty no matter what the monastery had to say on the subject._

4.  
“Okay, anyone here ain’t hung over?” Mal asked the crew assembled in convocation. River (who had been allowed only one small cup of watered-down wine), Inara (who never did anything so uncontrolled as to get drunk), Zoe (who had a hard head), the Shepherd (who had a lot of experience with retsina) and the newcomer raised their hands. 

“Bully for all of ya. Well, I’m like to die, might as well get this over with,” Mal said. “This fella here, who I don’t remember ever seein’ before, says I got hitched to him.”

Benjamin looked up timorously. Throughout the cargo bay, pupils dilated.

Once he could get Simon’s attention, Shepherd Book borrowed Simon’s encyclopedia. “Did you accept a cup of wine from this young man?” he asked Mal.

“Prolly…him and everyone else on the damn planet.”

“And did you stand under a tree and hold his hand?”

“Might have done, I was fairly unsteady from time to time…”

“And did he give you a branch of laurel?”

Mal, who had put on yesterday’s shirt, looked down at the pocket, from which several bay leaves protruded. He gave them to Kaylee, who was rostered to cook dinner that night. “Guilty as charged,” Mal said.

The shepherd closed the encyclopedia with a snap, and handed it back to Simon who looked almost as sick as Inara did. “That is the wedding ceremony of the Monastery of the Pantocrator,” he told Mal. “You, sir, are a married man.”

“Waidaminnit,” Jayne said. “Since when does monks let two fellas get hitched?”

Book took back the encyclopedia, launched it again, and scrolled through a few entries. “Apparently, since medieval times on Earth-that-Was, there have been monastic commitment ceremonies…”

“The monks of the Pantocrator are a sort of updated Manichaeans,” Inara said, idly wondering how her life had deteriorated to the point that it involved a round of Name-that-Anathema with Jayne. 

“So, when a guy in a fancy suit sends me over a drink, all I gotta do is drink as many drinks as he pays for till he makes his move, then tell him I’m a Girl-a-Keen?”

“It’s a him—I mean, a heresy,” Inara said. “They believed that the world was so dreadful and sinful that the true God couldn’t have created it, the Devil must have. So, while they would have been perfectly happy to see the human race die out—and indeed they consider the fate of Earth-that-Was to be a significant accomplishment of the true God—they grudgingly concede that not everyone is willing to be celibate. But they consider same-sex and opposite-sex relationships equally distasteful, and are willing to extend an equal degree of authority to permanent unions of either type.”

“Roll back to the ‘permanent unions’ piece,” Mal said unhappily.

Shepherd Book clicked a few times on the encyclopedia. “In essence, they believe that marriages are indissoluble. One might even say that they are more Catholic than the Pope, because the Bible does allow a man to put his wife aside for adultery, but the monks of the Pantocrator say…”

“Ya made your bed, you gotta lie in it,” Jayne said.

“An admirably terse summary,” Book said. “And, as far as I can tell, quite correct.”

“What’s that doodad say about folks that didn’t even know they got into bed or that someone short-sheeted it?” Mal asked.

“I don’t think they’re big on Situation Ethics,” Inara said. 

“I don’t hold out much hope,” the young man said. “But…I can walk back to the monastery and ask Abbot Gommen to give us a divorce.”

“An annulment,” Mal said firmly. “I ain’t used none of the goods, so I’m entitled to return ‘em for a full refund. But speakin’ of what folks got but didn’t pay for, Abbot Gommen still ain’t paid us the rest of what he promised, you might want to mention that too.”

“Of course, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow,” Benjamin said. “Today is the Eve of the Feast of Saint Hilarion, the abbot won’t talk about secular things on a sacred day…”

“Bound to be twice as Hilari-ous tomorrow,” Jayne said. 

Benjamin was way ahead of him on that one, and expected to be able to reel out high-days and holidays until he could finish the grift and collect his own payoff. He thought four or five days would do it. There was a Cunard-Blue Star Liner heading to Beaumonde in six days. If the age of miracles was not yet past, and the Abbott actually coughed up the money he owed to Serenity, then Benjamin could trouser it on the way back to the ship. Or, for that matter, use it for a comfortable hotel room to hide out in until the Cunarder lifted off. 

Wash cleared his throat. “What I’d really like to know is how you ended up marrying Mal in the first place. Okay, he’s adorable, I grant you, but you two wacky kids sure fell in love awfully fast, and my own spouse took a leisurely path to the nuptial altar…also, you being a monk seems like it would put a kibosh on the whole horse-and-carriage thing.”

“Oh, I’m not a monk,” Benjamin said, gazing up appealingly through a fan of coal- (or kohl-) black eyelashes. “My mother died three days after I was born. My father had damp lung, and they tell me that when he knew he was dying, he took me to the monastery and left me with the monks. They didn’t really want me, and I’ve always wanted to go someplace in the wider world, where I could learn, and do exciting things and hear beautiful music and see wonderful works of art. They knew all along that I had no vocation, and then when you arrived…well, it seemed like the answer to their prayers.” Given the sheer volume of prayers, he thought his cover story would be the liturgical equivalent of monkeys eventually typing “Hamlet.”

“What a story!” Zoe said. “Everythin’ but the bloodhounds nippin’ at his behind!” (Benjamin was annoyed at the interruption—he was waiting for the chance to drop a hint that his father’s war service had weakened his lungs.)

“Zoe!” Kaylee said reproachfully. “Fella tells us he’s had a hard life, and wants somethin’ better, and you got no call to be mean to him for it.” She turned to the newcomer. “We’re headed to New Melbourne,” she said. “Well, once we get the money for the fuel. Might be a job for us there. Ain’t much in New Melbourne but fish canneries, but you can get work there, save up some money, then go off and see the ‘Verse.”

“It’d be one kind of funny if Mal wanted to keep him around as his love slave,” Jayne said, to a round of winces and flinches all around, “But a different kind if we keep him ‘round without even so much as a booty call for the boss.” 

“I have some money saved,” Benjamin said. “It’s not much, but…I could pay a little bit for my passage, and work for the rest….”

“Cap’n already said he ain’t interested in your passage,” Jayne said. “And he ain’t no politician, sometimes when he says somethin’ he ain’t lyin’.” 

“So you wasn’t there for the bells and smells, you just fetched up there?” Mal asked. After a micro-second of analysis, Benjamin nodded. 

“Ain’t that just religion all around,” Mal said. “Worse’n the government for herdin’ folks like so many sheep.”

“And goats,” Book pointed out. Zoe gave him a look that suggested that Serenity’s denizens fell into the Goat column.

“We’re not actually going anywhere, with or without him, until we get some cash,” Wash said. “Or, if you have some ideas for getting fuel without cash.” He forebore to point out that perhaps they could steal some, but that would require being able to get where there was some to steal. The monastery’s fuel stores ran more to hay and straw for the living, breathing variety of mules than to isotope cells.

“I could use a hand clearin’ out the back stockrooms,” Kaylee said. “We’re always puttin’ that off ‘cause it’s all boring and dusty and smells bad even though we can’t put our finger on why.”

“Wouldn’t fight too hard if he wanted to take my shift tomorrow, polishin’ the brightwork,” Jayne said.

5.  
To break a chain, Benjamin reminded himself, you start with the weakest link. The elderly Shepherd had told him that that innocent, sympathetic girl was the ship’s engineer. After a stroll through the ship, taking note of many interesting features that he observed, he was not surprised to find her in the engine room.

“Thank you for standing up for me,” he told her. He extended his hand. “In all the confusion, we haven’t been introduced. I’m George Danvary.”

“Kaylee,” Kaylee said. “Kaywinnet Lee Frye, to go the long way around. Don’t feel bad if they was sorta harsh on you, we been havin’ bad times, and, like they say, last guys don’t finish nice. They got good hearts, deep down. Well, except for Jayne.” Now that she had him all to herself, Kaylee realized that, if anything, she had underestimated how beautiful he was. {{Ain’t that the way, though? The new shiny’s always shinier. Especially now that somebody’s actually noticing I’m alive, unlike some people…}} 

“I’m impressed,” Benjamin-George said. “Maintaining a, um, vintage ship is a big job for just one person. Lots of fleets wouldn’t even let a ship go long, they’d send it back to a depot for regular team maintenance.”

“That ain’t Mal’s way,” Kaylee said. “You don’t know him.”

“Fine with me,” Benjamin-George said. Kaylee realized that they hadn’t been all that far apart when he entered the engine room, and gradually he’d gotten a lot closer. In fact, he was looking into her eyes, any closer and her eyes would swim and he’d look like a crazy flounder instead of a damn fine-looking man. His eyes were saying “Well? Yes?” and then her eyes were closed, which was pretty much an answer. There was something about him as insubstantial but lovely as vapors or perfume or campaign promises but the shoulderblade and the back muscles under her hand were solidly modeled. 

One of his hands was gentle at the side of her waist, as if preparing for a proper cotillion. His other hand was inside her coveralls, poised over her lightweight undershirt, probably not a move he had learned at either a cotillion or a monastery. “Such pretty peaches, Kaylee. And what’s sweeter than peaches?”

She had a handful of ass on each side, so what was that, mangos? And she found herself leaning, closing in on banana, and that’s pretty sweet.

“Whoa. Before I left home I promised my Mamma I wouldn’t get mixed up with married men, ‘cause that’s how you end up in the Special Hell.”

Benjamin-George stepped back. “That makes sense in terms of people living up to their commitments, and in terms of your not wanting to break another woman’s heart. But your captain and I didn’t make any commitments of our own free will, and there’s no way he could care any less about me.”

He had somehow managed to unzip the zipper on her coveralls, and the top was going to fall off if she didn’t catch it, which she didn’t. 

“Beautiful!” he whispered reverently, and then asked, “Is that your hammock?” on a more practical note.

“The Special Hell,” she said to herself, and he said, “No, no,” which confused her considering whose idea it was, so he edited it to “No, no you won’t.”

Kaylee was impressed that he was either experienced or a fast learner, because it is not that easy to shuffle through a whole deck’s worth of Kama Sutra in a hammock. She was certain that, for example, Simon would have found a way to do a header and somersault onto his dumb smart head. 

“Couldn’t help noticin’…” Kaylee said, pointing to the tracker anklet that had made itself evident at certain moments. “I can turn that off, get it off you, in just a minute or so. Ain’t much to the electronics of it.” She shook her head. “Don’t it beat all that they’d stick a tracker on their monks—well, all right, their orphans that ain’t monks--but still try to fob you off on Mal? Pure heathen meanness.”

“I’d really appreciate that,” Benjamin-George said. As she worked away with her set of miniature keyhole tools, he said, “Tell me some more about Fireflies. I’d love to know as much about Serenity as you do.” 

“Don’t reckon you’ll stick around here long enough for that,” Kaylee said. “But it’d be a pleasure to just give you the top layer. Nobody seems to care as much as they should. Fireflies generally is grand, of course…”

“It’s a noble marque,” Benjamin-George said. “I daresay you’ve made a few mods, though, done some customizing…”

“Startin’ right the first day I had the job!” Kaylee said with a grin. “She was runnin’ a reg couple that was just spliced it, wasn’t even doin’ nothin’, so I just yanked it out. Like this.” She suited the action to the word, leaving the tracker on the engine room floor. 

Kaylee told Benjamin-George he could have her shower, while she went to her room to take a sponge bath and change her clothes.

Once they had made their way to the next turn in the corridor, strolling with punctilious casualness that made Kaylee suppress a giggle, River emerged from her hiding place near the engine room door. Her sojourn there had been most educational. 

She scooped up the tracker from the floor and put it in the front pocket of her sweatshirt.

6.  
“Let me guess,” Zoe said. “The holy father said ix-nay on the ivorce-day?”

Benjamin-George nodded. He thought it was true, or at least probable, almost forgetting for a moment that the marriage was entirely of his own invention. If he had actually gone to the monastery and raised actual real-world concerns, he was sure that any plea on behalf of payments to Serenity would have been rejected.

“How come when you figure things out, they believe you?” River said. 

“Mostly ‘cause she ain’t loco,” Jayne said. 

“And the rest of our money?” Mal asked.  
“Oh, I thought you understood,” Benjamin-George said. “Please don’t judge the monks too harshly. You see, the harvest this year was poor, and it was necessary to bring in artisans from the other side of the moon to fix the roof…”

“Well, if that don’t beat all. Maybe I waded into the wrong side of this fight. I’d be inclined to go to the jailhouse and tell the lawmen that I must have been mistaken, let them bandits go ‘cause there ain’t no witnesses,” Mal said.

“Too late!” River said, yanking an imaginary rope, her head flopping gruesomely and her tongue protruding. 

“So you’re the payoff?” Wash said. “Not all that negotiable...and hard to divide up.”

“Cheap at twice the price, I’m sure!” Simon said eagerly.

“Simon, you’ve outdone yourself,” River said, straightening up.

“Well, that tears it,” Mal said. “Bad enough when folks choose to go out whorin’ off their own bat. Human folks are not to be bought nor sold. All right, you can stay ‘till we get to New Melbourne.”

“Which, at this rate, will be any century now,” Jayne said. 

“Jayne’s Pa used to say there’s always work for them that wants it,” Mal said. “That ain’t been my experience, but folks don’t stay long in New Melbourne if they got choices, so them that don’t got much in the way of education or papers and such can usually find a job soon’s their feet touch the fishy dust. You could work your way, hold your head up, not be beholden to nobody.” 

7.  
Benjamin-George tapped deferentially at the door to Inara’s shuttle. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” Inara said, lighting the spirit stove to prepare a hospitable bowl of tea. 

“My name is Nicholas Monroe,” he said, craning his neck to look all around the shuttle. “I’ve never met a real Companion before,” he said. “It’s a great honor. Although, I can see that not everybody here sees it that way.” 

Inara was of two minds about this. She could not disagree with the content, but felt that she had a monopoly on snarking about Mal. 

Benjamin-George-Nicholas sat down gracefully, then adjusted his body (which, to both Inara’s professional and personal eye, was quite lovely) into a wide-legged sprawl. Inara agreed that this was more correct body language for the role he had adopted. It more than incidentally displayed the assets that generated a forcefield of Instant Bad Judgment. She wondered if that was what she did herself: it could explain why her work was usually easy, sometimes too easy.

“I…haven’t been in a position to see a lot of beautiful things,” he said. “And to be a Companion! To devote your whole life to beauty, and pleasure, and to making people happy, must be wonderful. A real calling.” He saw her mala draped over the mirror, and glimpsed a corner of her shrine, so he said, “And to be able to feel free in your body, giving and receiving pleasure, without some old man with a beard telling you it’s wrong…”

Inara was going to advise him that his wide-eyed yokel act was a touch overstated. But then she wondered if she was too harsh a critic. A barnstorming actor would, for example, have to tailor his performance to be seen and heard in the very top of the Peanut Gallery.

{{Companion training}} she thought. {{But not completed. He’s not polished enough.}} And she was right. Ten years earlier, the Training House of the House Parisien had expelled Neal Bennett (although his grades were adequate and his practicals quite good), when they discovered that his transcripts, recommendations, and student visa had been crafted by Loving Hands At Home. 

“And yet,” he said, “You take care of everybody else, but who takes care of you? You’re always the mirror—the flattering, tinted mirror for the clients who see themselves much handsomer and more important than they really are. Who thinks about pleasing you, whose delight shows you how beautiful you are, how passionate? Who makes you happy?”

Inara had clients whom she had helped through crises, or celebrated their triumphs. Some of her regulars had been in her life long enough for her to view multiple episodes in their stories. She was genuinely fond of some of them. They had many fine personal qualities. But, although their balance sheets and professional accomplishments were well above average, the nature of the job meant that most of them were middle-aged and decidedly plain. Most of them were plump. Some of them had wattles. Inara knew that there wasn’t an ounce of sincerity in what Benjamin-George-Nicholas said, but that didn’t keep it from, however inadvertently, being true.

The fabrics and lighting in her shuttle were chosen, within budgetary limitations, to display the beauty of the undulating black velvet of her hair, and highlight her skin. It all worked just as well with the shorter waves of his hair, when she was the one looking. The jewel box framed sapphire eyes as well as topaz ones. 

{{Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor}} Inara thought. And that was the last Latin thing she thought for a while although a certain number of Latin-named activities ensued. 

8.  
Mal had Waved up everyone he could think of who might have a job that was either payable in advance or so lucrative that the deposit would get them out of the hole they were in. Although they wouldn’t have been in the hole if jobs like that hung from gooseberry bushes.

9.  
Neal didn’t think it would get him anything, but if all you were ever going to do was work, work, work then you might as well get a job at one of those fish canneries that the crew seemed to love as much as Abbot Gommen loved Saint Vladimir. 

“I must be getting old,” Neal said. “Most men would have been on me in ten minutes, not trying to teach me about independence and self-esteem.”

“That was the captain,” Simon said. “I’ve performed a fairly extensive panel and I still haven’t been able to rule out heterosexuality.” 

“I hope it’s not epidemic,” Neal said.

“Endemic,” Simon said, “Encountered in the bulk of the population. But not contagious.”

They were sitting on Simon’s bed at the time, which was a promising sign. Simon stroked the hair clear of the nape of Neal’s neck, kissed him there, pressing aside the neck of his shirt to kiss down until his head rested on Neal’s shoulder.  
Neal could tell that Simon came from money. He wondered what was underneath those worn but obviously hand-tailored clothes. When he found out, it was all he could do not to cross himself and say Grace. 

Neal wasn’t sure if Simon knew that he looked like that. (Neal had always known, about himself—it was, after all, his weapon in his struggle against the world.) 

Although Neal’s skin felt as cool as the first bite of powdered sugar on a doughnut, Simon thought it was the first time he’d felt really warm since…at least since walking up Serenity’s gangplank (a term that he found particularly appropriate). Maybe since he started wondering about River’s letters. So, although he was pretty sure Neal was up to something, he had no intention of asking what it was, considering that he was up to something and had no intention in the world of telling Neal about it.

An hour later, Simon crashed, dead to the world. Neal couldn’t imagine how anyone could sleep like that—both hands clutching the pillow over his head, one knee twisted out flat on the bed, the other leg protruding beyond the narrow mattress.   
Neal had learned to move quietly, but just in case, he dangled his shoes from one hand as he glided out of Simon’s room. He paused at the doorway, and said conversationally, “Neal. George. Caffrey.”

10.  
It was a nice day, and there weren’t many captain-y things to do without fuel or money, so Mal decided to take advantage of the sunshine. He parked on a folding canvas chair, outside Serenity’s cargo bay, under Kaylee’s umbrella, with a big bottle of mineral water nearby.

“You folks lookin’ for passage?” Mal asked, wishing that he had been wearing something a little more nautically natty than an old pair of cargo shorts, flip-flops, and a squashed olive-drab canvas hat with strings under his chin.

“Aw, no, but I would like to look over the passenger rooms, then have my son Elbert look at the books, see what kinda passenger revenue you’ve been getting, see what I can improve, y’know,” said a lanky man, sandy hair turning to gray. He was accompanied by a woman in an orange-and-pink sari and Wellies, and a plump young man with sandy hair wearing a green eyeshade. 

“Just who the hell are you?”

“Lester Stebbenich,” he said, extending a hand that did not get shaken. “You Captain Malcolm Reynolds?”

Mal nodded.

“Your husband sold it to me,” he said, holding up a burlap bag that had originally contained basmati rice and now jingled. “See, I got the rest of the money here, after I give ‘im the deposit.” 

“My…guh?” Mal said. Simon walked into the cargo bay. “Is everything all right?” Mal was surprised to see that Simon kept his right hand in his pants pocket, which was distended by something heavy that could have been anything from a rock to a small Christmas pudding but, Mal suspected, was a .38. 

“Go get Jayne,” Mal said. “Tell him to bring along…not Vera, but maybe Betsy or LouJean.” 

“And there he is!” the man said. 

“ _Shen me_?” Simon asked.

“Just GO,” Mal told Simon. 

“Sorry, wrong fella,” Stebbenich said. “What, ya got a whole harem of ‘em?”

Before he could say that he didn’t, Mal’s suspicions were confirmed. From two separate headings, two more parties were converging on Serenity. It’s all in the timing. Mal did what he could to encourage them to concentrate on screaming at each other, hoping and trusting that someone would throw a punch (it turned out to be a scrawny old lady in a sunbonnet and faded sprigged muslin dress). He waited for it to turn into a dust-up, but didn’t think he could afford to wait for everyone to wade into the developing brawl.

11.  
Mal ran inside, hit the button, and slammed the cargo bay door shut. “Wash!” Mal yelled into the comm.. “Everybody on board?”

“Yeah, everybody except your…yeah,” Wash said. 

“Good!” Mal said. “Wash! Kangaroo!”

Those who had experienced this maneuver before—and River, who was nobody’s fool but her own—held tight as Wash took off straight up, flew just long enough to escape easy detection, and landed at the nearest available clearing. Which took a few minutes to find. And that little shake-up to the landing gear, well, that could be fixed with standard parts readily available at any major vintage spaceship repair parts depot.

12.  
“Uh, Mal?” Wash said over the comm. “Remember that fuel problem we had *before* the energy-intensive evasive measure we just performed?”

13.  
Zoe joined Wash on the bridge. He approved of her idea right away, but it took some figuring to come up with a detailed plan for carrying it out. Inara agreed, although she agreed to make an advance rent payment of only three months, not four, and said that Simon wanted to learn to pilot a shuttle so he might as well go along and back her up.

Zoe didn’t think much of Simon’s abilities in either capacity, but Wash pointed out that Simon was maladroit but not stupid, and anyway if they didn’t get back they wouldn’t be that much worse off than they were then. Zoe said in that case they should send Jayne with Inara because at least Simon had taken a pound or so of artillery out of each of them so on balance he solved more problems than he created.

14.  
As midday approached, the day was warm (although the red sunglasses dealt with the worst of the glare). Neal stopped, thinking about taking off the sweater he had…borrowed…from Simon. He pondered whether his own coarse linen shirt underneath might look too informal when he went to the bank to cash out the funds transfers, then to a Cortex café to start researching informal disposition channels for ikons. Perhaps the best thing would be to go to his locker and change into his navy blue suit and Veterans of Interplanetary Wars tie. 

He’d have to be careful, though. He didn’t want to get glue or solvent on his good clothes. In a pouch around his neck, he had the three ikons he had…removed…at two in the morning. 

_Nobody caught him in the chapel (and he could alibi himself by claiming a sudden fit of contrition requiring intensive prayer) when he propped up three of the postcards in the place of the icons on the crowded altarpiece. Nobody saw him gliding back to his cell, where he covered the icons with clean white paper, then glued postcards front and back and scrawled purloined-letter messages on the blank side._

15.  
Waiting for Inara’s shuttle to return with the fuel cells, Wash sat in the cockpit, idly scanning the Cortex screen.

River, pale with shock, put down the triceratops and looked over at Wash, knowing that in about thirty-five seconds he was going to be very, very upset. 

“River, honey,” Wash said. “You’ll have to be brave. It says here that your brother has been arrested. We’ll have to go tell the Captain, figure out what to do.”

River shrugged. “Oh, is that all?” she said, then twisted up her mouth in thought. “Well, it’s not even a stupid mistake.” She picked up the toy dinosaur again, and sent it bouncing up and down the dashboard. “Kangaroo!” she said. 

16.  
 _Tantalizingly close to the Sihnonese Express office (and hazardously close to its security cameras, but no balls, no Iron Cross), Neal found himself boxed in by two purplebellies. “Dr. Simon Tam,” said the one with Lieutenant’s stars on his shoulderboards, “You are hereby bound by law.”_

_For a moment he was frightened because they had let him see their faces. Then he calmed down—of course they didn’t care if he knew what they looked like, they were the cops. “Wait, I’m not…” Neal said, then shut up, because there was absolutely no percentage in ever voluntarily saying anything to cops until there was a deal on the table. If he and Jayne had ever compared notes, they would have found this one area of commonality._

_Neal wondered about the “doctor” bit but he remembered that he usually left his Ident card on shuffle, and there was a doctor in there somewhere, although he didn’t think the name was Tam. The name did sound sort of familiar for some reason, but then Simon was a common name._

_They handcuffed him, bundled him into a groundcar, not even bothering to put a sheltering hand over his head. (He didn’t mind much, he wasn’t tall enough to keep hitting the window frame when he got arrested.)_

17.  
Simon, stopping himself at the very last millisecond from saying “Age before beauty!” let Inara make her stately way up the ramp while he followed behind with the hand truck loaded with fuel cells. Inara drove the mule from her shuttle to the cargo bay. 

Simon handed Inara a cell to replace the one they used on the trip to the fueling station, then started trundling the hand truck toward the cockpit.

Halfway there, he ran into Wash and River on their mission of notifying Mal. “Omigod, you escaped, what happened, how’d you do it, is Inara OK?” a startled Wash said at the same time as River waved languidly and said, “Hi, Simon.”

“Inara is fine—well, she was three minutes ago,” Simon said, with respect for scientific accuracy.

18.  
They unlocked the handcuffs, but it didn’t seem worth trying to get past two armed men, and anyway that was only long enough to attach one cuff to the back of a metal chair, and then do the same thing with another pair of cuffs on the other side. 

His captors weren’t deformed or hideous by any means, but they were plain and stolid-looking, which meant, in Neal’s experience, that he was going to get hit in the face a lot.

The sergeant took out a long pair of tweezers, carefully pulled a long light-brown hair off the sweater, and carried over to the computer station, which included a microscope. Neal didn’t know what good that was going to do, unless the hair included the bulb. 

Consistent with the way the day had been going, it did, and a few moments later the DNA analysis was complete. 

“River Tam’s hair,” the lieutenant said. “I don’t suppose you want to explain how that got there?”

It seemed fairly obvious to Neal that if they were less impressed with the wonders of modern technology they’d just look at the goddamn photographs and realize they had the wrong man. However, if they had done something low-tech but sensible like for chrissake looking at him or searching him, then he’d be in big trouble, so he could only hope that they’d keep playing with their Plum Blossom Day toys. 

19.  
“No, we ain’t gotta go get him,” Mal said. “I’m a man with a strong belief in justice…” (Inara snorted.) “Terms of what he did? That’d justify a few thumps but I wouldn’t kill him my ownself ‘cause it wasn’t low enough to show he needs killin’. “

“Actually, it was kind of funny,” Wash said, immediately withdrawing the statement when Zoe glared at him.

“Whatever happened to honor among thieves?” Kaylee asked plaintively. 

“The sooner we get there, the less he can tell them about us…that is, about Serenity, not just about River and me—whether voluntarily or otherwise,” Simon said. 

“Ain’t my problem, is it?” Jayne said. 

“And even if he has a few pithy words to say about a Firefly class name of Serenity, thanks to your very kind and helpful errand we can pick it up and move it where they can’t find it,” Mal said. 

The Shepherd steepled his fingers. “It seems that this agitation is created by an unusual degree of empathy,” Book said. “A greater understanding of how people feel when their property is stolen.”

“Wasn’t stolen,” Mal said. “I nipped that in the bud right smart.”

“Then shall we say, when it’s threatened?”

“Shepherd, what you don’t get is that everybody ain’t all mixed up together the same,” Jayne said. “There’s my stuff. And there’s their stuff. And screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke 'cause I'm bigger than them and I got better guns.”

“Do you agree with that, Captain? Is that a moral analysis you can endorse?” Book asked.

“You think this is what I want? What I want my life to be like?” Mal said.

“Yes!!” Inara said, allowing herself an extra exclamation point the way she might have rationed half a teaspoon of sugar into her coffee after a particularly rigorous kendo practice. 

Book nodded. Simon sighed. 

“In my work, I’ve come across a number of Browncoat veterans…” Book began.

“Then you must have real good eyes, ‘cause there ain’t that many left to be seen.”

“…and not all of them are criminals. There must be other paths, Captain?”

“The remnant of us, well, some of ‘em got to limp home, maybe lost a leg or crippled up to show for it. But that means they hadda have a home to go to, in the sense of it still existing. You want me to be a better man than what was done to me? I am.”

20.  
Simon caught up with Mal in the corridor, figuring that he was marginally more likely to succeed if Mal didn’t have to impress his crew. 

“Just three hours,” Simon said. “Promise me you’ll stay here for three hours before flying off to whatever nothing you haven’t got planned wherever we end up. I’ve never asked you for anything.”

“Well, why would you? Why except for your whole life thinkin’ everyone was at your beck and call, would you have the effrontery to ask, when all you ever done for me was stuff up my life worse than it was already?”

“Saved your life? Saved the lives of people you care about?”

“Might have noticed that, before you got here, none of us got a worse case of dead than they could treat themselves.” 

“Well, I don’t know how many crew members you started out with, do I?”

“Fine,” Mal said. “Three hours, and not one minute more. I should know by now, only way to get you budged off something when you’ve got your mind set, is a bullet in the head, and I can always use another lousy poker player ‘round here.”

“Thank you.” Simon nodded, thinking that he needed two hours and had bought himself four.

21.  
Simon shifted the untidy bundle in his arms to get a free hand, knocked on the wall next to the door to Inara’s shuttle, and entered when she said “Xing-jin.” 

Kaylee, who was half-sitting and half-lying on the bed, sat up enough to tip a little more engine wine into her lacquered teacup. She offered the flask to Inara, who declined. 

Inara, the teapot aloft, raised an eyebrow at Simon, who put down the bundle—it clanked—and accepted a cup of unadulterated tea. He sat down on the opposite end of the sofa from Inara. 

“Look, I’m…” Simon said. “I feel…well, some responsibility toward him. Not least because they thought he was me.”

“Well, River says he was wearin’ your glasses,” Kaylee said. “And your sweater. Guess I didn’t make enough of an impression on him to take any of my stuff.” 

“You too?” Simon asked Inara. She nodded. “I would have thought you’d have known better?” Simon said. Kaylee glared at him.

“ **I** would have thought I’d have known better,” Inara said. “He is a…persuasive young man.”

“Wait,” Kaylee said. “You slept with him too?”

Simon nodded. “Hey!” Kaylee said. Simon was going to point out that yes, and the sun rose in the south and set in the north, but he managed to stop himself in time. Because, philosophically, that only highlighted how relative such things are. And he was going to have to live with Kaylee. 

“Sex,” Simon said, and ground to a halt. “It’s…it’s a human act. It creates a connection. Temporary sometimes, of course. Even transitory. But it has meaning. It still means something. Inara, I think that’s what you feel toward your clients. With them.” 

“Ain’t right that Mal will just leave him to it,” Kaylee said. “But, what can we do, the three of us? We ain’t exactly the Chrysanthemum Commandos you’d see in the Saturday serials. We don’t even know where he is.”

“Actually, we know exactly where he is,” Simon said, “And if they move him, I can get a readout on my encyclopedia. River…”

“Uh, some of the stuff she says is a little bibbledy,” Kaylee said. “Maybe we should get confirmation before we, you know, do anything too dangerous.”

“In this case, it’s not what she said, but what she did,” Simon said. “She picked up the tracker from the engine room and put it in the pocket of his trousers. We should count ourselves lucky that it was my **sweater** he appropriated.” He opened his encyclopedia and showed them the location. It would take about twenty minutes on the mule, plus a few minutes to find someplace to stash it and then walk to the target.

“What’s in the bundle?” Inara asked diplomatically. Simon unwrapped it, showing a .25, a .38, a lightweight submachine gun, and quantities of ammunition for each. “Given Jayne’s attitude of primitive communism toward **my** possessions, I thought these would come in handy,” he said. He gave the .25 and the ammunition boxes to Kaylee, gallantly allotted the submachine gun to Inara, who checked it over, and cleaned it with a chiffon scarf. (That was purely precautionary; Jayne didn’t put his weapons up dirty.) 

Simon slammed a clip into the .38 and distributed the remaining clips between his pants pockets and vest pocket. Then he picked up his travel medical kit, because he expected there would be some casualties. Inara wrapped the cloth around her shoulders, not because it complemented her outfit but because if they all got out they’d need to conceal the weapons again, and if they didn’t a stretcher might come in handy.

22.  
The day shift at the Parliamentary Bureau of Investigation came on duty. They touched base with the agents coming off the Prawn shift, went to the samovar for their first cups of green tea, shucked their jackets, and logged into their Cortex accounts.   
Agent Burke leaned back, watching irrelevant things scroll past, until a bell pinged and a pop-up window appeared on his screen. “What the hell is he doing there?” he said, half to himself, then went to the Special Agent in Charge’s office to get authorization for a couple of personal days.

23.  
Simon wrapped the cloth around his hand—there were disposable gloves in his medical kit in case extensive concealment of fingerprints would be necessary—and tried to turn the doorknob, which of course was locked. He ran back, threw his shoulder against the door, took another run trying to kick it, and finally dashed back behind Inara and Kaylee and nodded.

Inara put a tight pattern with the submachine gun around the lock, and pushed the door open.  
When the shooting started, Neal scrabbled his chair back as far as it would go. It tipped backwards, which hurt but frankly the floor didn’t seem to be the worst place in the room to be. 

The lieutenant seemingly agreed, but it turned out that he had caught a ricochet in his side, and was being fairly stoical while creating a puddle of blood.

Inara, who naturally owned a handcuff key, unlocked Neal’s cuffs and whispered, “Wait.” 

Simon took a quick look around the room, checked the safety, stuffed the .38 into his belt, and said, “Kay…” stopped himself in time, and said, “Kain ya give me the medical case, Marthy?” while thinking that he sounded like a real inbred back-birth. Kaylee put the case down on the floor and kicked it toward him. When it arrived, he fielded it, doused his hands in sanitizer, put on a pair of gloves, and cut away enough of the lieutenant’s uniform to see that the bullet had punched into his side, fairly sluggishly. 

“You go on,” he said. “Take…well, him…back to the, the place where we were,” reflecting that actually he didn’t sound much vaguer than when there weren’t secrets to protect. “If I’m not back in fifteen, no, make it half an hour, go back to…you know. That other place. Divisional HQ.” 

Inara nodded at Neal, who stood up, looked pointedly at the machine gun, which was not forthcoming, looked pointedly at Kaylee, who was more than happy to turn over the .25 to him. Neal took the sergeant’s sidearm, cuffed him to one leg of the table with the goddamn microscope, and turned his gaze to the door, feeling at least mildly ridiculous to have one gun in each hand as if habitually went around with guns blazing. Inara nodded, and she and Kaylee escorted Neal out of the building and to the waiting mule. 

Simon was only ten minutes behind them—he took the precaution of throwing the lieutenant’s sidearm as far into the corner as he could, then gave him a couple of injections, took out the bullet, cleaned the wound, and threw a little Weave on it, all tasks he could have done with his eyes closed even when he wasn’t riding an adrenaline high. 

24.  
It was a good thing that Neal could walk by himself, because he got the distinct impression that even his rescuers weren’t going to carry him. He acknowledged that it was not very tactful to upbraid them for shooting through the door, but, really, that was exactly the kind of trust in luck that got the person you were trying to rescue, killed. 

The mule was pretty crowded, and worryingly slow when being operated in biodiesel mode, not to mention that half a batch of moonshine-in—progress had to be sacrificed for this purpose. 

“Well, if it ain’t the Coalition of the Excessively Willing,” Mal said. 

“And if those ain’t my guns. You’re payin’ me for the ammo, y’know,” Jayne said.

“Got ya a regulation Fed sidearm,” Kaylee said. “That should pay you back with interest.”

“That was deeply stupid, this whole thing,” Wash said admiringly. River had provided a remote play-by-play commentary that was mythopoetic but could be disentangled given the time it took for the party to return.

Zoe shrugged. “C’est magnifique—well, passable—but ce n’est pas la guerre,” she said. 

Inara, grateful as usual to have her own shuttle to retreat to, retreated to it. There was an interesting Wave awaiting her.   
Dinner had come and gone, so Kaylee, not even bothering to heat them up, heaped a couple of leftover biscuits with a thick layer of mustard and some Hammetta and pickled greens, and went back to the engine room to see how things had gotten on in her absence. 

Simon went off to see how River was, and found her cheerfully playing solitaire cribbage. 

Before Neal, from whatever mixture of motives, could follow Simon (or for that matter Kaylee or Inara), Mal and Jayne asked him where the hell he thought he was going, so he sat down on the sofa under their baleful glares. Neal cheered himself up with the thought that prison guards have to spend a lot of time in prison, and they have to punch a clock to boot.  
Mal did consider taking off just to prove a point, but inertia took over so he didn’t order anybody to do anything.

25.  
Simon sat on his bed, his knees pulled up and his head pillowed on them. He didn’t think he was sulking, he thought he was having an ethical quandary. He did sew up Lieutenant Tang (albeit after being involved in shooting him in the first place), but he gave him a shot of scopolamine, which combined with post-traumatic amnesia probably meant that Tang wouldn’t be able to give any useful testimony. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t therapeutic and Simon sort of wished he hadn’t done it. Or rather, he was glad he had done it but didn’t think it was the right thing to have done.

River told him not to worry about it. He thought she meant that the end justified the means, but actually what she meant was that no sooner had Corporal Hueffer finished mopping up the blood on the floor, two guys with gloves, who responded to any Cortex chatter with the name “Tam” in, showed up and did what they did. 

26.  
Inara crossed from her shuttle to the corridor, and into the dining room, followed by two well-dressed people.

Neal groaned.

Mal reached for his revolver. “I know Fed when I smell it,” he said grimly.

“Stand down, Mal,” Inara said. “That’s why I brought them here…to vouch for their bona fides.” 

The pretty, dark-haired woman went over to Neal, crouching near his chair and tilting up his chin to examine the damage. “Did you do this to him?” she said indignantly.

“The night is young,” Jayne said. 

Simon crossed his arms and looked down. “No,” he said. He was beginning to realize that he wasn’t going to get even a hamster’s worth of gratitude out of this adventure. “It was the Fed.”

“It was all a mistake!” Neal said. 

“Mistakes tend to happen in your vicinity,” Agent Burke said.

“Out of all the gin joints…” Neal said. “How’d you find me?”

“I turned the tracker back on,” River said. “And stuck it in your back pocket.” 

“I’ve met Ms. Serra before,” Peter said. “The Companion houses have often provided valuable information to the PBI.”  
Mal was going to say something about whores and Purplebellies and lying down with pigs and getting up with hogs, but Inara’s glare discouraged him.

Neal started to say something, but River said, “Serves you right for stealing Simon’s sweater.”

“It’s a…souvenir.”

“Like serial killers take?”

“Anyway, look how well it worked out for me,” Neal said. 

“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit, son,” the Shepherd told him. Agent Burke looked at him. Book shrugged. "No, they don't listen to me either."

“We still might kill him,” Jayne said. Neal was pretty sure that this was a hollow threat. Mostly. “Nothin’ I hate like a low-down dirty deceiver.”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “But he’s our low-down dirty deceiver. So cut him the hell loose.” 

“Is there a reward?” Mal asked reflexively.

“I think we should leave him at New Melbourne and see how he likes eight hours a day of dead sardines,” Kaylee said. “Twelve, when the catch comes in.”

“Really, don’t you want us to take your problem off your hands?” El asked.

Everyone except Mal and Kaylee nodded, so finally he gave way to a distasteful bout of democracy in action.

27.  
There wasn’t much to pack, and many pairs of eyes to make sure that he didn’t augment the small collection of humble possessions had had brought with him.

The Shepherd gave him a rather more paternal hug than the last few. 

Neal was pretty sure that he was being patted down, and for something hard but in this case small…and flat. And he didn’t even mind that much. It was only one more fiasco in what had turned into a never-ending string. 

Anyway, River had taken him aside and pointed out to him that the ikons couldn’t be priceless Earth-that-Was relics, because the “gold” was a pigment that wasn’t used until the twenty-fourth century; it was a powdered mineral fairly common on St. Alban’s, but had never been seen on Earth. 

28.  
They say that if a thief looks at a holy man, all he sees is his pockets. Book reminded himself to dust the ikons for fingerprints and make sure they were buffed off…but not, as Augustine prayed about chastity, just yet. Kaylee could be quite proprietorial about her treasured hoard of cornstarch, but she had seemed quite partial to…well, whatever his name was, and would want his friends to be able to take him into protective custody without incident. 

The shepherd set up the three ikons, leaning against the few books on the bookshelf affixed to the cabin wall. He put his meditation cushion on the floor, and lit two small oil lamps and a brass dish of incense. He picked up the Buddhist rosary, a gift from Inara (“mala, not bad in the Latin,” she said, with a smile; he augmented it with the small cross that Kaylee welded out of some old tubing and filed smooth), and sat down on the cushion. 

He found the story quite inspiring. One of the greatest artists of the twenty-fourth Century, after years of rollicking hell-raising, settled down to produce a small trove of religious artwork reflecting his whole-hearted conversion and genuine piety. Rather like a latter-day Botticelli renouncing the vanities.

One of the greatest artists, whose tiniest sketch—a few ink and pen lines on a cocktail napkin—was worth tens of thousands of credits. 

At the next stop where there was postal service, Book promised himself that he would send a small package—anonymously—back to the Monastery of the Pantocrator. In the meantime, he looked at ikons, drinking in their stern beauty. “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner,” he chanted, around and around the beads.

**Author's Note:**

> "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor," from Ovid, means “I see and approve the better way, but follow the worse.” Or, in the words of a later poet, “I should have known better with a girl like you…I should have realized a lot of things before.”


End file.
